The Failures of Emmanuel Macron

Watching France burn this weekend made me think of that moment in 2017 when Emmanuel Macron became president on a platform of change and hope and, well, “Révolution.” That was the title of the book he published before the election as a kind of manifesto for how to beat the far right.

Less than a year after Brexit and Donald Trump’s first election, Macron did beat Marine Le Pen. I was living in London at the time, where there were French families who spontaneously left to return to France to be part of his “mouvement.”

Almost a decade later, Le Pen looks more likely than ever to become France’s next president. Today I write about how Macron may get his revolution — but not the one he was hoping for.

The man who didn’t save France

There were already signs that Emmanuel Macron wasn’t totally checked in.

When thousands of high school students took to the streets earlier this month protesting funding cuts in education, the French president chose to spend the day on a warship off the coast of Brittany. As my colleague Mark Landler reported, Macron watched a new ballistic missile being fired from a French nuclear-powered submarine, leaving it to his prime minister to try to reassure the French people that the government was on top of the crisis.

Then things got worse.

By the time Macron finally spoke publicly on Sunday, the student protests had snowballed into broader violent riots across the country with many more people. Crowds smashed windows, burned cars, looted stores and vandalized public buildings, including the near-destruction of the historic town hall in the city of Limoges.

Both the government’s failure to foresee the riots and its response to them have been criticized across the political spectrum. Even before the violence, Macron’s approval rating stood at an abysmal 15 percent. He doesn’t have much lower to fall.

It’s all a far cry from 2017, when he took office at 39 years old, fresh-faced and confident, promising sweeping economic reforms to save France from stagnating growth, an ascendant far right and perhaps above all, a prevailing sense that France was no longer a functional society.

It hasn’t worked.

Not trickling down

Macron, a former investment banker who had served as an economics minister in a center-left government, beat Le Pen in 2017 by pitching himself as neither left nor right. He promised to unite a fiercely divided country and to make sure French voters would “never have a reason to vote for extremism again.”

He also ran on an unabashedly free-market platform: Make it easier and cheaper for companies to invest in France. They’ll create jobs and economic growth. That’s how you win back voters from the far right, the argument went.

Over the past nine years, Macron cut corporate taxes and payroll taxes, and abolished a wealth tax. But none of that has meaningfully boosted economic growth, nor has it reduced France’s ballooning debt.

The tax cuts cost the French treasury tens of billions of euros a year. The debt level — never low — is now widely seen as unsustainable. French taxpayers could spend more on the interest on their public debt next year than on defense and education. There’s now a widespread sense of systemic crisis and social injustice.

Many of these problems predated Macron and were made worse by events that were out of his control, like the pandemic. But it’s against this backdrop that this weekend’s protests descended into the worst riots in years.

Street protests are part of the political culture in France. When I lived there, I covered many. But Saturday’s rioting, which came after half a million people marched against the rising cost of living and deteriorating conditions in schools, was unlike anything I ever saw.

The large-scale protests from students and union members made clear that almost 10 years of Emmanuel Macron have not fixed France’s problems. And the violence and looting that followed, in which rioters damaged an estimated 3,000 businesses, along with multiple symbols of the French state, could make some voters more willing to vote for the Le Pen presidency Macron had pledged to prevent.

Le Pen’s campaign mode

Before this weekend, Le Pen was already the favorite to win the presidency in next year’s elections. But in the aftermath of the violence, her National Rally party wasted no time.

While Macron’s government and the far left were busy pointing fingers at each other for the rioting, team Le Pen went straight into campaign mode.

“People need to wake up now,” said Jordan Bardella, the president of the National Rally party. “They need to make the right political choices, and in any case, we stand ready to restore order in the country.”

On Sunday evening, Le Pen released a video address in which she painted a picture of a divided France. She was filmed sitting behind a wooden desk, with the French flag behind her, hands clasped — the image of a president in waiting, as one of my colleagues put it.

Macron’s relative youth and rousing rhetoric once invited comparisons to Barack Obama, whose message of hope he sought to emulate. But, like Obama, Macron’s elite credentials and intellectual manner also made him seem out-of-touch to many voters.

Now, Macron’s legacy looks likely to be very different from what he’d envisioned — and, like Obama’s, it will be shaped by who takes office once he’s gone.

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This chicken casserole, based on two French recipes, is simple to prepare yet stunning. The addition of seedless grapes elevates it from easy everyday to dinner-party material. Be sure the grapes you select are sweet and have green stems, a sign of freshness.